This is a pretty good sign. We went to see the modernism in america show at the Hammer museum and it was pretty fun, all the Duchamps were fun to see and some of the painting were incredible - but I'm always a sucker for Kandinsky. But more surprising were these very evocative and moving videos by Jesper Just, a Danish artist, of men singing. In one a bewigged man sings an american pop song in a deep bass voice with a Danish accent and then slowly falls to the ground - doing an impersonation of "The Dying Swan". Move over Pavlova!
We also went a while ago to look at the Klimt's that had been restored to the heirs od Adele Bloch-Bauer after being looted by the Nazis. Anyone seeing the huge gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer can imagine why the painting was looted - It's GOLD! Any normal soldier in the field could tell it was valuable - it's GOLD! It's a huge painting, not something that one could simply hang over the old couch and it fills your entire visual field with GOLD! However the best painting was the one of birch trees. Once again a huge canvas with a landscape of birch trees. In art history books you always see the portraits Klimt did of women, which are always rather ambivalent about their subjects and which seem to surround their subjects with ornamentation that is more visually impressive than the women, who become enmeshed in the patterns. But you never see the landscapes which are really beautiful. Apparently he used lenses to flatten his visual field which then gives the paintings a flatness and an attention to surface while also portraying a three dimensional world. So you sort of get a visual impression of something that is both flat and deep.
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